


Push Me On A Lilo Out To Sea

by Cinnamonbookworm



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Damien Darhk is Felicity's father, F/M, but i started this a month ago so here we are, morally grey felicity smoak, really don't read this if you aren't into felicity being less-than-an-angel, references to darhk!felicity, season 4 speculation, there is a funeral and a death and they are not the same person, yes i know it was just proven not canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2015-11-01
Packaged: 2018-04-29 08:09:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5121164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cinnamonbookworm/pseuds/Cinnamonbookworm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>When she is four years old, they get a dog.</i>
  <br/>
  <i>(That’s how her eulogy begins, with the story of the dog).</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Push Me On A Lilo Out To Sea

**Author's Note:**

> so this was _supposed_ to be a halloween fic (shh it's still halloween here it's like 10:59). but then wendy mericle broke my heart and said darhk!felicity wasn't happening and then i didn't want to write this and got into a big writing slum (hence why neither allusions nor amber of the moment was updated this week) (well technically the writing slum started before the no darhk!felicity announcement but whatever)  
>  anyways, here it is. hope you guys like it. and i hope it's haunting enough for halloween

When she is four years old, they get a dog.

(That’s how her eulogy begins, with the story of the dog).

It’s a nice dog; large, protective, a boy so they won’t have to worry about puppies. When she is four years old, her father sits her down and produces a black and white German Shepherd and says, “Yes, good, here. Now you can have a friend to play with.”

She hadn’t had friends before. Not real ones, anyways. The girls she’d played with had moved onto newer, shinier, people and the boys were.. well, her father scared them really bad the last time they’d come over and they hadn’t talked to her since. But that had been okay; boys were yucky anyways.

When she is five years old, the dog eats the flowers in the garden and gets really sick. When she is five years old they can’t afford to take their sick dog to the vet so her father takes his shotgun off the wall and shoots him.

(There’s an appropriate gasp at that point. But those who truly know the reasons Captain Lance lies dead in a coffin before them, know shooting a dog is not the worst thing her father has done).

She’d learned about death at an early age.

And her father, being the practical man he was, took the opportunity to turn the traumatic event into a lesson. He’d sat her down, on the same porch bench where he’d given her the dog (probably a reminder that he could give and take everything in her life as easily as snapping his fingers) and told her something that had stayed with her for the rest of her life.

“You see death is a beautiful thing,” she tells the audience. Someone _anyone_ might recognize this speech if those who had been present in that room in Star City the day he’d recited it weren’t all dead. “We die, we go into the ground. Our remains grow into flowers. It’s only in the interval after dying that new things can sprout.”

The security footage had been erased even beyond her capabilities, but he’d sent it to her. Just like he’d sent her the footage of the almost-proposal. Another reminder that he could give and take parts of her life as he pleased. Another reminder that she was never going to be free from him.

_“You’re not him, you know_ , _”_ Thea had whispered in her ear mere minutes ago as she’d helped clasp her black necklace. _“It’s a choice. We don’t get to choose our parents, but we sure as hell get to choose whether or not we’re going to be better people than them.”_

Thea would know.

She doesn’t get to wish that it was her father lying in the casket, or that she’d grown up as a Lance instead of a Darhk. She doesn’t get to pick and choose what parts of life she accepts as real and what parts she shoves to the back of her mind.

She’d done that for too long. With the dog story. The belt story. The time he’d driven her out into the desert. She’d told herself they were bad dreams. That she’d just been demonizing her father because he’d left them all alone. This was the man who’d given her a friend when she’d had none. (But he was also the man who had taken it away just as quickly).

“Now I, personally, try and not to have such an optimistic outlook on loss. I tried to live by that idea of renewal for a long time, but it’s probably easier to accept that kind of outlook when you’re the one leaving others behind.” She gets a few confused expressions staring back at her. “For those of you who don’t know, my father left us not long after that. I never saw him again.”

That’s a lie. She just saw him the other day. The other day when he’d decimated what was left of father-figures in her life. The other day when he’d killed Captain Lance, a _good man_ (despite what anyone else might think) for no reason other than to torture his own daughter. He’d killed a man to prove a point: nothing that she loves is safe. He’d taken Laurel and Sara’s father from them just to torture Felicity.

Hatred doesn’t even begin to describe how she’s feeling about her father right now.

“So, let me tell you: loss sucks. And the loss of a man who touched us all so dearly isn’t going to be quickly swallowed down with the sentiments of my father. But we _can_ create good from his loss. We _can_ honor his memory. And I intend to do just that.”

She’s speaking in her CEO voice, the voice she’d found in a conference room full of people who doubted her and were trying to pull her strings. But Palmer Tech is where she’s going to get the money she needs to honor Captain Lance’s memory the way she should. She needs everyone to remember the man who sacrificed _everything_ to keep this city safe, from long before she showed up in Starling City.

“There are many parts of this city that would not be the same without him. I know his daughters, Sara and Laurel, can attest to that.”

She doesn’t motion to them; they’ve been gone since she started speaking, off to avenge Lance’s death. Even now, Thea excuses herself from her spot at the back of the room and Oliver shifts anxiously beside her.

They all need to get going, but she needs to stay. Felicity Smoak: the woman who happens to be the key to everything theses days. They can go, sneak out of the funeral with ease, but nothing can work if she stops talking. Darhk has eyes on her at all times now. If she glances at the door, if she acknowledges them leaving, if she even blinks wrong, everyone else she loves could die.

Luckily, her father taught her something other than that death is more than just an opportunity. In the weeks she’d spent with him, he’d taught her how to lie.

And oh the many lies she’s told since he came back into her life. The most common one so far being “I’m fine.” But she wasn’t fine, has never been fine since she first saw the ring that now sits heavy on the chain around her neck.

Two rings lie there now. One, a not-yet-promised commitment to trust and love and knowledge that not everyone in her life is going to leave her forever. The other, an engagement ring. She hasn’t fully accepted either yet. To Darhk, it should look like she’s still deciding, still warring between whatever person she was before this all started and the person he molded her to be.

But Darhk still doesn’t understand that she was broken long before he came back into her life.

She’s been missing a part of her soul since he left her on the steps of their porch in Vegas with the dead dog and then later with no father. Unfortunately, none of Team Arrow really seemed to understand that either until this year.

Felicity Smoak stands on a podium, giving a eulogy for someone who died because of her, smiling that polite cold smile and saying a beautiful speech that means absolutely nothing to those who know the truth, and holds all the cards.

She’s held all the cards since Quebec. Since he left her alone with one of the computers of the H.I.V.E. mainframe.

They all came at a cost. She almost lost everyone. She still could. And he’s right, if she _does_ lose everyone, that path leads straight to him. But she’s not going to. Not today.

Not if she has anything to say about it.

“Which is why Palmer Tech has commissioned his accomplishments to be honored in bronze. Starting next month, construction will begin on the Lance Memorial Park in the Glades, right where Captain Lance disarmed one of the earthquake machines in 2013, saving countless lives.”

A park. She hates herself for this park. This park isn’t going to keep him alive. But at least when she has children of her own she can take them there and tell them all about Captain Quentin Lance, who, in a city full of masks, was the ultimate hero.

Maybe that’s the real reason for it being a park. So it can be a place for the generation that comes after this madness. The generation of children, with her and Oliver’s leading the front.

Wait… _what?_

_She wants this._ The ring suddenly gets ten times heavier on it’s chain. _She wants this, with him. She wants to make the choice her father couldn’t. She wants the whole deal._ Suddenly she wants nothing more than the engagement ring to be on her finger.

She wonders if the offer is still on the table.

Felicity tries her best to keep her eyes away from him. He stands behind her, ready to make his remarks as Mayor of Star City, and she knows things have been… difficult between them since Quebec, but the thought that he might not _want this_ anymore hurts almost as much as it hurts to look at the body of Captain Lance that lies in front of her.

_The things she’d sacrificed to keep them all safe…_

Oliver got to make the tough choices last year. This year, it was her turn. She still remembers that chilling conversation they’d had when she’d first come back.

~

_“Quebec?” Oliver registers and she watches his eyes close slowly as he comes to the conclusion she’s sure the rest of the team must’ve reached by now. “That was **you**?”_

_“We did what was necessary for the mission.” Her tone is short and clipped and she genuinely believes it, she really does._

_“Felicity you can’t just **kill** people for the sake of a mission.”_

_“Oh is that what you think happened, Oliver?”_

_“What I **think** ,” he starts, tempor visibly growing, “is that you’ve never had a problem with the body count.”_

_Felicity’s laugh is bitter, hauntingly chilly, even for the January air. “That’s rich, Oliver. That’s really rich coming from the guy whose first and only goal when he came back from the dead was not about his family but about killing all those who wouldn’t bow down to his **mighty will**. You do not get to lecture me on this, Oliver.”_

_It’s a low blow and they she knows it. The situations don’t really compare, but maybe she’s taking some sort of joy in watching him squirm. She’s **always** supported him, even after everything he’d done in Nanda Parbat last year. Even when she’d known he was wrong. Lectured him, yes, but the support had always been there. But now that it’s her turn, he doesn’t seem to want to return the favor. It’s just like her father had said, all of it. They don’t **understand**._

_There’s been something… different about her since Quebec. Like a weight has been lifted off her shoulders, one she hadn’t even known existed. One that gives her that good kind of chill. A chill that has nothing to do with the ice outside._

_And Oliver just doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get what it’s like to feel free of that kind of weight after all those years because he **grew up with a family.** Sure, most of his family turned out to have deep dark secrets, but at least he had them. _

_Her father may not be great, but he’s the only one she’s got. And she would think Oliver, of all people, would understand that. She’s had to build a family in Team Arrow from the ground up. He was born into a loving one._

_And now that part of her soul that was missing for so long has finally found it’s place, she doesn’t ever want to give it up again. She needs it. Just like she needs the weight of the second ring on the chain around her neck._

~

Felicity wants to glance back. But she does not. She. Does. Not. Look. Back. At. Oliver.

It takes all of her willpower. Because all she wants to do is look back at him and check to see if the look of love she remembers from last summer is still there when he sees her. She hasn’t been checking lately; it’s too painful to think about.

“It is my hope that this is just the start of rebuilding Star City into a city where people can feel safe again, where good, honest, people, like Captain Lance don’t have to leave their families far too soon because of terrorists and earthquakes and epidemics. The citizens of Star City shouldn’t have to die like this anymore. Let’s make Captain Lance the last victim of this.”

The applause is loud and clear and makes Felicity’s head hurt, but as she steps away from the microphone, she looks down at the casket and whispers one last thing.

“Bye, Detective.”

She doesn’t know how she makes it off the stage without crying, but somehow she does, and she holds it all in because Darhk is still watching her. She finally allows herself to make eye contact with him when she finishes and he gives her a little head nod, as if she didn’t just tell the city to do the exact opposite of what he wants.

He trusts her too much.

Must run in the family.

“We’re in!” Laurel yells over the comms. Sara notes her approval through a grunt.

Felicity wonders how long it’s going to take them to get to the altar. Ray’s working them through it right now, since he knows the building better than almost anyone except for her.

Diggle comes to stand beside her, and they take their leave while Oliver stays for the rest of the burial. She tells herself she can cry about the parallel between throwing dirt on Sara Lance’s grave last year and Quentin Lance’s grave this year later. Right now they’ve got work to do.

The two of them take the path by the bay to get to the campaign office. It’s not the _quickest_ route, but she likes the quiet time with Dig it gives her. They haven’t exactly been close the past few months, what with her working with HIVE and HIVE killing his brother.

Still, now, she looks out at the ocean and thinks about the woman who said yes to a proposal on the beach in front of a thousand reporters and wonders if she’ll ever be able to make her way back to that. The pure unadulterated feeling of love without restrictions.

He’d told her she was good at self control, when she’d been training with him last month.

Her father had looked her in the eyes after he’d told her to throw away the ring that wasn’t given to her by him. _“You’ve got self control like I’ve never seen, Felicity. Sure, your mouth can get away from you, but we both know I can fix that. But your heart, you’ve been keeping a close eye on that for a while now, haven’t you?_

She hadn’t told him it’d been his fault. He already knew. And he’d somehow seemed proud of that fact.

She wants to kill him.

She supposes maybe that’s the sense of camaraderie that bonds her and Diggle as they walk along the ocean today. They’ll be able to find their way back to each other eventually, she’s sure of that, but right now both of them want her father dead.

Maybe that’s why he’s not surprised when they take a sharp turn to one of the warehouses by the docks. Where she’s supposed to rendezvous with her father.

A crash sounds over the comms and then Laurel asks, “You sure about destroying this thing, Felicity?”

“Absolutely.”

She’s not really sure how they destroy the stone altar in the end. Perhaps Sara knocks the precious gems out one by one with her bowstaff. Perhaps Ray just annihilates the whole thing with one of his rockets. Perhaps Laurel beats it to dust with her police baton. Perhaps Thea takes all the bloodlust she’s been holding inside of her and uses it to destroy whatever magical spirit it inhabits.

All she knows is the ring her father gave her stops pulsing with energy and the comms go fuzzy for a second and then Sara speaks softly, “It’s destroyed.”

That’s when her and Diggle part ways and she opens the door to the warehouse.

Her heels click down the concrete flooring until she gets to her father’s makeshift office here.

“Wonderful speech, _Fe-li-ci-ty_ ,” he tells her. “I’ve always thought you to be quite the wordsmith. You get that from me, of course. Your mother never really was one for inspirational speeches.”

Felicity clenches her teeth from behind her polite smile. She hates him. She hates the way he belittles her mother and draws out her name in the way that only feels nice when Oliver does it. She hates how he’s been ruining everything for her since before she was born.

“Of course, all those nice words about ‘rebuilding Star City’ mean absolutely nothing in the long run, but it’s always refreshing to be reminded just how much power you wield. And all on your own, I might say. Most of the people here were nothing before I made them great, but you, you’ve always been great.”

“I wouldn’t say that…”

“Modesty is unbecoming, Felicity. Take credit for your work. You’ve got Star City wrapped around your little finger. Even Queen is still in love with you.”

She wonders if he knows she never melted away the engagement ring. She wonders if he knows it sits right next to _his ring_. And… did he just say Oliver’s still in love with her?

“Don’t look so shocked. People are attracted to power. And you, my dear, you reek of power.”

She doesn’t _want to_ reek of power, not anymore. The only power she’s ever wanted to have is power against him and he gave her every weapon but that. At least, he thought he did. Her heartbeat against the no-longer-pulsing ring says otherwise.

“Well, do you want to see my weapon of mass destruction or not?”

She says yes, although she doesn’t really care. She knows he can’t use it now, not after the altar’s been destroyed, not when he gave her his last remaining ring of magic. They walk down a long hallway together until they get to the actual storage section of the warehouse. And that’s when Oliver bursts in.

Darhk puts up a hand to stop the arrow coming towards him, in a lazy gesture that she’s seen repeated a thousand times. It does nothing. The arrow hits him in the arm.

He looks down at the blood, then at her.

“Love is weakness” is all she says.

She shouldn’t relish his look of betrayal as much as she does. She knows he’d expected it at first, of course, but then Quebec had happened, and she’d stopped wearing the engagement ring and she guesses he’d started thinking she’d changed sides.

And she had, for a little bit there, but when he’d said _blood is thicker than water_ , she was reminded that the actual phrase is that _the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb._

She doesn’t think anyone has ever double crossed him before and gotten away with it. But she’s been living with the hurt of his betrayal for most of her life, he can live with hers for now.

Then Dig comes around the corner, and the three of them begin to fight.

Felicity knows how now, but she stays out of it. She doesn’t like being out in the field, and she doesn’t like the memories that now come with it. She’d rather be running tech in the Arrow Cave, something she loves and learned for herself, than beating up bad guys in the field, something her father taught her and something she regrets every day.

Even without his magic, Darhk puts up quite a fight.

It’s ironic, she thinks, that for all his speeches and talk of greatness, he never says a word to her about what she’s done. In fact, he doesn’t say a word to her again.

“I want to get married,” she tells Oliver when Dig has her father at gunpoint. He nearly stabs his hand with the arrow he was reaching into his quiver for.

“Felicity… are you sure…”

“Yes,” she breathes, letting her steely gaze drift to her father, stripped of magic and nearly unconscious on the floor. “I’m not afraid of _his mistakes_ anymore.” She looks at Oliver then, “Do you…? Still want this?”

He looks at her with eyes blown wide with love, the look she’d so desperately sought during the eulogy earlier.

“Of course.”

“Then you’ll have to forgive me for this.”

She gives him a quick kiss before pulling away, and taking her father’s ring out from under the front of her black dress. Oliver looks at her, confused.

Dig had wanted the kill shot, she _knows_ that, but she also knows Oliver would have never let him take it. And she’s the only one with the power to actually destroy Darhk anyways. The ring he’d given her, amde from the same element as the stone altar he’s used for too long to keep himself alive, it’s the only thing that can stop him. And she’s the last person who can use it. Nyssa might be able to, but she’s not here right now. And this - well, he deserves to die.

Felicity brings the ring to her lips and repeats the same chant he’d once used on her when she’d got a cut on her forearm while sparring.

_“Words don’t really matter_ ,” he’d told her then when he’d taught her his phrase. _“It’s all about intent. You could say Hocus Pocus or a Harry Potter spell as long as you’re envisioning_ exactly _what you want to happen. You have to_ mean it _, though.”_

She means it now, she means every word. She watches as the youth slowly begins to drain out of him, the years he’d stolen from his victims fleeing his body as the seconds pass. She clutches the ring tighter and repeats the phrase. His eyes bulge, his skin sags, he looks like a living corpse and yet she still keeps going.

She could stop now, she knows she could. Leave him old and fragile and magicless to be imprisoned on Lian Yu _,_ but he should’ve died long ago. _This_ is the natural order of things.

This is karma.

Oliver and Diggle look too stunned to move, but Oliver brings his hands up anyway, as if to try and tame a skittish deer. She knows all they’re seeing is the person she was under her father’s influence. She knows right now they’re seeing the ruthlessness, the darkness, the bloodlust that comes along with having evil run through your veins. She can feel the magic as she goes, pumping through her heart with that accompanying adrenaline that feels almost like a drug. She could get addicted to this feeling.

She almost had.

She would have, if not for the heavy weight of the ring that slides around the chain next to the one she’s currently whispering into. There are two rings on this chain and one of them has the power to change her life and the other one is currently resting a nanometer from her lips and emitting that almost radioactive glow that is doing this to her father.

Darhk takes his final breath when he is nothing more than something close to a husk of a person. His skin looks as thin as paper and the blood he coughs up beforehand is black. Felicity would like to imagine his heart has shriveled to it’s real size, like a walnut, maybe smaller.

She doesn’t look at Dig or Oliver, doesn’t want to see the horror in their eyes.

She’d read the autopsy on some of the Arrow’s first victims in Starling City after she’d joined the team; even then, none looked quite like this. She doubts even the worst victims of Oliver’s torture had their pain extended for so long before they died.

Although, perhaps maybe some of the people he killed in Russia…

She doesn’t look up when Thea walks over from the guard she’d been fighting to stare at the body. She doesn’t even look up when Ray and Sara and Laurel make their way into the room.

She only looks up at the entirety of Team Arrow surrounding her when Laurel puts a quiet hand on her shoulder. “I- I _had_ to,” she says.

Sara’s the next to touch her, brushing her chin up with her thumb so she’s looking Sara in the eyes. “You made sure he’d never hurt anyone again,” Sara smiles, “I understand.”

“And… I mean I just took away the years of his life that weren’t even his to begin with, so technically I was just restoring the natural order of things and I _know_ it looks bad, I know. Just… don’t hate me. Please. He deserved to die.”

Oliver begins to make his way over and Felicity doesn’t know what to do. The engagement ring presses into her sternum, a quiet reminder of all the things she wants and isn’t going to get now that she’s done this. _How could he ever love her after what he’s just seen?_

She holds her breath and doesn’t look at him. She doesn’t think she can survive seeing that loving look from before completely vanished from his eyes.

He doesn’t say anything, just wraps his arms around her. Laurel and Sara take a step back.

“I could never hate you, Felicity,” he whispers into her hair. “And I forgive you.”

She can’t really believe it, so she looks into his eyes for confirmation. Every piece of love that was there before she did this looks back at her. “So you still want to marry me?”

“Yes, Felicity,” he smiles, sighing like he doesn’t even understand why she’s asking. “Always, yes.”

She kisses him then, grabbing his face in her hands and letting her knees weaken as he brings an arm around her, dipping her a bit and bringing their bodies closer.

When she runs out of breath she pulls away and brings the chain with the ring out from under the front of her dress.

“You kept it?”

“ _Of course_ I kept it.”

He presses a kiss to her fingers and then helps her take it off the chain and slide it onto her ring finger.

“It looks good on you,” Thea remarks from her place beside Diggle.

“If you hurt her, I’ll kill you,” Laurel jokes, before hugging the both of them.

“I’ll help you,” Dig says, grinning at the two of them.

Felicity walks over and hugs him. “I did it for you, so you wouldn’t have to,” she tells him, before pulling away.

He nods and gives her that sad look he always gets when someone brings up Andy.

Felicity looks down at the body of her father, lying motionless on the ground, weak for the first time since she came into this world.

Soon the police will be here, along with a sad reminder that Captain Lance cannot be brought back. They’ll have to wonder how this old man died. And when they do the DNA test, the name that comes up will be Adam Smoak, the name she’d known him as.

She looks down at the body of her father and thinks one thing amidst the happy air of celebration around them:

_He deserved to die._


End file.
